Visual aesthetic perception of handwoven cotton fabrics

We revealed the factors that govern the visual aesthetic perception of handwoven fabrics by performing two psychological experiments to determine the effects of cotton hand-spun yarn on the perceptual and cognitive responses to woven fabrics. First, a free sorting task followed by multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis explored the effect of yarn type (hand-spun, machine-spun, and slub-yarn) on the woven fabric. Visual categorization of the fabrics depended on yarn type. Second, functional and aesthetic perceptions that produced the differences among yarn types were investigated by semantic differential scaling method that collected subjects’ ratings for the fabrics from 17 bipolar adjective pairs. Generalized linear mixed-effects modeling revealed the association between the yarn type and perception expressed by functional and aesthetic words. Visual aesthetic perception of fabrics was also affected by the consumers’ background. Our method and findings can be applied to examine the visual aesthetic of other textile products.